SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is a huge part of your website when it come to trafficking in the right visitors. The difference between an optimized and a non optimized site can mean thousands of hits. So what does it mean, and how do I do it?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your websites traffic through organic search engine results. What are organic search engine results? Anytime you type in a keyword or phrase into search engine, the websites that come up as non-paid advertisements are your organic results. Seems like a simple enough thing right? Well… sort of. There are dozens of different things that contribute to a well optimized website, and below are only just a few major ones.
Page titles, descriptions, and keywords
Titles, descriptions, and keywords play a key role in SEO. They are all located within the <head> tag.
Page Titles:
Having a page title is very important. Not only does the title tell a visitor what the page they’re on is about, it’s also the key information displayed by search engines. A good way to format your titles is to have the page title, followed by any other pages it’s under, and then your website name. For example:
1 2 3 4 | <!-- About me page --> <title>About Me - The Online Portfolio of Aaron Gloege</title> <!--Blog entry with the title SEO --> <title>SEO - Blog - The Online Portfolio of Aaron Gloege</title> |
However you want to format your page titles, it’s always important to put the current page’s title before your website title. This way, it’s makes it easier for search engines to know what your page is and index it accordingly. This isn’t the only way you can format your titles, but it is best when you choose your way to stick to it throughout your site.
Description:
Page descriptions are another important role in telling search engines what your page is about. Unlike the page title, this is a <meta> tag, therefore not seem by visitors, but key in search engine indexing. Think of the description as a movie synopsis, or a book summary. It gives a more detailed description about your page. It’s also the summary text that accompanies your page in search engines.
1 | <meta name="description" content="Useful tips on how to optimize your website for search engines (SEO) and increase your traffic." /> |
Don’t make your descriptions too long. Most search engines will only use the first 160 characters of a description. So make it short, but informative. Include a few major keywords that relate to your page’s content.
Keywords:
Keywords are useful when you want your page to be associated with certain search words or phrases. Simply list your keywords/phrases separated by commas.
1 | <meta name="keywords" content="search engines,seo,web development" /> |
There isn’t really a limit on how much you can do, but it’s always safe to not use too many, and use accurate keywords for your page. Some search engines, if they feel your pages contain too many keywords that are not relevant to it’s content, will mark your site as indexspam and ban you. Although I doubt you’d get banned for ONLY listing incorrect keywords, it’s something you want to watch our for.
Links
Links are important in your site. Search engines use them to crawl and index your site, so it’s important to have them labled well. It’s important that the text you choose for your links is descriptive enough that, alone, it is understandable. Here are a few bad examples:
1 2 3 | <a href="{url}">back</a>
<a href="{url}">email</a>
<a href="{url}">here</a> |
As you can see, when they are taken out of their context, these links don’t clearly state what they’re linking to. The text contained in a link should be descriptive enough that, when alone, still makes it clear what the link is to. Here are some better examples:
1 2 3 | <a href="{url}">Back to Main Page</a>
<a href="{url}">Contact Me</a>
<a href="{url}">Click here to read more</a> |
Now, there is still one thing missing from these links: title tags. Title tags are a short description of what your link is. They provide additional information and expand on the meaning of your links. The link text is there to name the link, while the title attribute provides information about where the link will send the user. Examples:
1 2 3 | <a href="{url}" title="Main Directory">Back to Main Page</a>
<a href="{url}" title="Send me an Email">Contact Me</a>
<a href="{url}" title="More detailed information on SEO">Click here to read more</a> |
A common practice with the title tag is to simply duplicate the link text in the title attribute. While this doesn’t hurt your links, it doesn’t add too them. It’s best to describe the link in more detail than the link text.
Images
Images are a great way of displaying graphics and information. The only downfall: search engines have no way of knowing what the image is without the alt attribute. What is the alt attribute for? It specifies alternate text for user agents that cannot display images. So without it, search engines, and people who can’t view your image, have no clue what the image is of. Your alt attribute’s should describe what the image is of, and the information it conveys. In essence, the alt attribute should be the text equivalent of what the image is.
1 | <img src="image.jpg" alt="The Online Portfolio of Aaron Gloege"> |
It’s never a good idea to have long text data conveyed via images. Search engines can’t read text embedded in images, so if you want search engines to understand your content, keep it in regular HTML.
If you do need to use images instead of text, make sure to give alt attributes to everything appropriately and thoroughly. For example, if the main menu throughout your site are images with various roll over states, it’s EXTREMELY important to have alt attributes on those images, and title tags on the links describing what they are. Otherwise search engines don’t know how to index them as easily, and it can hurt your site’s rank.
Heading Tags (h1, h2, h3, ect)
- Have your page title in a h1 tag, with sub headers in h2, h3 ect.
- Don’t use header tags to display none vital information, as search engines will mark it as so.
- Include some of your pages keywords in your h1 tag to increase your search rank.
XML Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps are a HUGE boost to help search engines index your site. Instead of search engines crawling your pages for links and following them to index your site, you submit a sitemap, telling search engines exactly where all your pages are on your site. With sitemaps, you can also specify to search engines how often to crawl your site, and when you last updated a page.
Sitemaps are especially useful if your pages are loaded dynamically from a database or other data storage methods.
Here is a snippet of my site’s sitemap:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | <urlset xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.aarongloege.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-07-07T23:44:37+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.aarongloege.com/contact/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-07-07T23:44:37+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
</urlset> |
This is the basic setup for a site map.
- <loc> – URL of the page. The URL must begin with the protocol (ie http).
- <lastmod> – The date you last modified the page. It should be in W3C Datetime format.
- <changefreq> – How frequently the page is likely to change. Even though search engine crawlers may consider this information when making decisions, they may crawl pages more/less frequently than specified.
- <priority>
The only required tag is the <loc> tag. The others are optional, but only add to the ease of search engines indexing your site.
Now what?
After you have made your sitemap, you submit it. You can go to each search engine individually, and submit your sitemap, or there are sites that will submit them to multiple search engines for you. A simple google search will help you find what you need.
So…
There’s a lot more too optimizing your site, but these are some of the major ones. It may seem tedious at first to add title attributes to all your links, or creating sitemaps… But you’ll be rewarded with more traffic because of it.
July 8th, 2009 // Web Development |
(5.00/5) 2 votes. Loading ... |
Nice SEO info. Thank you for that. Hey, a geeky question for ya’. Where did you get your awesome “Share” icons? Is that a WP Plugin or…? Looks great on the dark bg. Cheers!
Thanks for your comment! I got the share icons from Komodo Media, and they are part of my template (not a plugin).